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I am three lessons into the “sinners to winners” beginners course with Preston Roller Girls. I already agree with all of this!
prestonrollergirls.org.uk/

If I had 50c for every time I heard someone say that men’s sports are just more interesting that women’s? I’d have the world’s fanciest pair of custom skates, a wall of wheels for every occasion, and a whole new wardrobe full of that fancy workout gear made of space-age fabrics with go-faster stripes. And maybe even a pony.

Women’s sports aren’t interesting? Y’know, whenever I hear someone say that a sport is less interesting to watch when women play it, I mentally file them away as someone who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about athleticism, skill, teamwork or dedication and who’s just into sports as a way to… damn, now I’m trying to think of a non-ciscentric way to say “wave their dicks around” and I’ve got nothin. (Anyone wanna help me out there?)

Sports are interesting or they’re not, and different types of bodies playing the same sport…

In June I made a request to the BOE for breakdowns of staff within different salary bands by age, gender, ethnicity etc. One of the frustrating aspects of their response was that they grouped together salary bands, giving a single figure for people earning between £17k and £46k. They explained that the reason for this was to allow data from the Prudential Regulation Authority to be combined with BOE. I don’t have salary amounts for PRA, but have done a quick graph of numbers of male and female staff at the end of this post.

For staff employed directly by the Bank of England, I now have numbers of staff in each salary band by gender. The bands are given in a public document on the BOE website, and I have taken the reference point, or the mid-point of each band, to ease comparison.

Salary Band

Median salary or reference point

Female

Male

Band1+

Head of Division,

£ 123,623

10

46

Band2

Senior Manager,
Senior Economist,
Technical Specialist.

£ 94,562

31

98

Band3

£ 73,645

78

166

Band4

Analysts,
Section Managers.

£ 57,794

95

197

Band4T

£ 37,845

36

69

Band5

Senior Clerical Staff,
Research Assistants,
Support Staff.

£ 37,137

138

159

Band6

£ 28,948

273

193

Band7

£ 20,885

48

57

Total

709

985

From a quick glance, it is clear that there are many more male staff at the top of the organisation, as we already knew; and that there are proportionally more women in the lower bands. It is easier to get a sense of this visually:

Bar chart of numbers of male and female staff in each salary band at BOE: men dominate every band except the second-lowest salary group

Suddenly it is very clear that there is only one band with more female staff – Band 6, and there is almost parity between men and women for the two bands either side. These are the bands with examples given such as “Senior Clerical Staff, Research Assistants, Support Staff”.

At the top end, there are vastly more men in bands 1 – 4. Here are those numbers by proportion in each band:

Proportion of men and women in each salary band at BOE: female staff make up just 18% of Band 1+, 24% of Band 2, 33% of Bands 3-5. There is rough parity in the lowest salary bands, with more women only in Band 6 (59%)

We already knew that more than 80% of the staff in Band 1 are male, but it is particularly interesting to see the pattern like this – very clearly the proportion of men steadily increases as you move up to the highest salaries.

Given that there are vastly more men earning the highest salaries, I did some very crude calculations to see roughly how much is earned by men and women at the bank. Assuming (a very big assumption, of course) that everyone is earning the median or reference point for their band, the following graph gives an impression of how much income is held by each gender and band. As the columns show, there is significantly more money held by the large proportion of men in the top three or four salary bands. Due to the significantly higher salaries, the small number of staff at the top of the organisation hold vastly more money; in the lower bands, there are many more staff, but overall earnings are much lower (shown visually as the bars being lower than the lines only towards the right hand side).

Bar chart showing total earnings across each gender and salary band (number of staff x median salary in band) overlaid with lines showing number of staff in each band.

I’ve presented this same data differently, using stacked columns below:

Stacked bar charts showing total earnings for women and men at BOE.

Overall, there is variation but rough parity between genders up to band 4T, or £38k, but then earnings among men shoot up as they have significantly more staff earning at the higher bands. With 276 more people (985 men and 709 women), the men working at the BOE earn £23 million more than the women.

All of this really serves to confirm what we suspected all along – that the BOE is dominated in management and authority roles by men. What we can’t answer of course is why, but research elsewhere tells us time and again that structural inequalities have an effect on women at every level of organisations like this.

We also knew that until recently, the board of BOE was entirely male, although there are now (since July 2013) two whole women listed among the Governers and Executive Directors. I hope that, in future, with at least those two voices having some influence at the top of the Bank, we won’t end up in another situation where we’re faced with having no women represented on our banknotes.

Finally, the Prudential Regulation Authority staff numbers, showing the same pattern of more women in the lowest salary bands and more men in the highest.

I got to wondering about how many women work for the organisation. It seems most likely that their board of middle-aged, wealthy, white men, simply failed to consider equality issues when making the decision about who to next put on a banknote. Would an organisation with a diverse workforce make the same mistake? It will be interesting to see how much information the BoE holds, and what their employment policy is.

I would like to make a Freedom of Information request for the
information held on the staff makeup at the Bank of England (BOE).
My specific enquiries are as follows:

1) Information held on the number of males and the number of
females employed full time as staff by the BOE, their seniority of
position and salary band

2) Information held on the representation of different age, gender,
ethnicity, religion, and disability within staff and freelancers
(if applicable) of the BOE.

3) Any details of Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) that were
conducted under the three previous public sector equality duties
(race equality duty, gender equality duty and disability equality
duty), which were in force until April 2011 when the new single
public sector equality duty (PSED) came into force and replaced
them.

4) The BOE Human Resources Policy on Equal Opportunity of
Employment and details of hiring procedures to ensure employment on
basis of merit and equality of opportunity

Louise Mensch said yesterday on twitter that ‘cis’ is “an offensive term that I don’t recognise”[1]. This inspired the tag #ThingsMoreOffensiveThanCis which is about equal parts hilarious-things-that-aren’t-offensive and really poignant transphobia.

But, I accept that there are people who may not yet have heard the term ‘cis’ and may want an intro. The briefest definition I can give is: Do you know what ‘trans’ means? It’s the opposite of that[2].

The main reason I’m offended by the constant questioning of ‘cis’ and people calling it an abusive term, is that it suggests that when we talk about gender, cisgender people are automatically ‘normal’, and transgender people are to be singled out. It posits cisgenderism as the default. As many homo- and bisexual people have said over the years to heterosexual people: you’re not normal, you’re just common.

In fact, just about every argument against using ‘cis’ has a homologue in the use of ‘straight’ as the opposite of ‘gay’. If ‘straight’ were to be challenged in any of these ways, it would be seen immediately as homophobic.

These arguments, laid out by CN Lester (and each well-defeated in the space of a tweet) boil down to the following:

1) Cis is a new word and I don’t know it

Well yes. That’s the nature of language, it evolves. You didn’t know what “smartphone” meant ten years ago and yet you’re probably using one now. It’s also not new, having been used since at least 1994 online, and in peer-reviewed work since the late nineties[3]. The reason you don’t recognise it is because you have not been actively involved in debates around gender. Thankfully these discussions are becoming more mainstream now.

2) I don’t ‘identify’ as cis

I have never particularly identified as white[4] but that doesn’t mean that I don’t experience white privilege. I am able to see that my whiteness means that I am not subject to the same racist forces which deny opportunities to people of colour. If you lived in a society where you were regularly being told that you were trans, but did not feel trans, I suspect you would identify strongly as cis. This is again because we have been trained to equate cis with normal. Once you accept that it is not the default state, it becomes easier to identify with this label as a neutral term, without any assumption of shame or pride.

3) You shouldn’t label me without my consent

Why not? I’m sure you have no problem with me labelling you as human, as literate, as an English-speaker. The issue with consent here stems from you not liking the concept of cis. Which goes back to wanting it to be the default state which doesn’t require asserting. Whether you personally identify with the label, get a tshirt printed and go out declaring your cis pride is up to you. The fact that you are cis is just that, a statement of fact.

4) Why can’t I say ‘non-trans’?

Because, again, this suggests that ‘non-trans’ is a default state and thus that trans people are abnormal. How about black and non-black; or woman and non-woman? Do those make sense to you?

5) Why can’t I just be a woman/a man?

Because trans people are often denied that opportunity. And I highly doubt you ever identify as just a woman or a man. What about your sexuality? Your politics? Your job? Your relationship status? Your religion? These are all single facets of your identity, and cis is just another one.

It is important that we are able to distinguish characteristics like this in order to be able to discuss them. There is serious, often deadly, discrimination facing many trans people, and that discrimination needs to be dissected and destroyed. In order to do that we need to be able to separate trans peoples’ experience from cis peoples’. Referring to ‘people’ and ‘trans people’ would be hugely othering[5].

6) It’s all part of your trendy online clique!

As I said in point 1, the word has been around for a long time. But the spread of the internet, forums, blogs and twitter has the specific advantage of helping to level the playing field. Everyone with access to a computer/smartphone and an internet connection (which is not everyone, by a long shot) is able to have their say. Thus the people with the large platforms in traditional media are pulled up when they say offensive things. Things like “cis is an offensive word”.

7) Cis is too hard to explain!

It’s the opposite of trans. If you understand trans then you can explain cis. If you want more, it means someone whose gender identity is the same as the one which was assigned to them at birth.

If you’re into etymology, cis has its roots in Latin; meaning “on this side of”, in comparison with trans meaning “across, on the far side, beyond”.

Really, I can’t think of any reason that someone could be genuinely offended by the term cis, unless they are deeply attached to the idea of trans people being some sort of special kind of sub-set of a given gender. It is simply and literally the antonym of trans. If cis is offensive, then so is trans.

I’m incredibly happy to see how many cis people are standing up now and saying that they recognise the need for this term to become mainstream, and that it is clearly not offensive. I just wish that more of the cis people with the largest platforms would get on board too.

[1] Being a bit facetious, at the time I went with the ‘don’t understand’ meaning of ‘don’t recognise’ and questioned how someone can be offended by something they don’t understand. I still think it’s a valid point. Go ahead and refuse to recognise a word, but you can’t also be offended by it.

[2] This entire post relies on the gender binary. It is definitely more complicated than that, but I’m aiming for an intro here. Apologies to those excluded.

[3] Link is to use of ‘cissexual’ as analogue to ‘transsexual’

[4] Largely due to the fact that every person I’ve seen with a strong white identity is also a massive racist *waves to EDL, BNP, SDL etc.*

[5] Othering = to other, make seem different and sub-human. A tactic used far and wide to justify discrimination.

The point of infographics is that it is easier for our brains to parse information in visual form rather than as text. I would argue this is especially true of the sorts of images that pop up on our news feeds and that we might only glance at for a few seconds before we move on. It is far less impactful for me to say that only 2.4% of CEOs are women and 97.6% are men, than simply to show this graph:

Stacked bar chart showing CEOs by gender: 2.4% women and 97.6% men

So I took it upon myself to copy out their statistics and, in the quickest, dirtiest way possible, put some visuals into their image. I sincerely apologise for how ugly this is, it was achieved using Excel, Paint and Publisher in the shortest time possible (I should really be studying). A designer I am not. But I find it astonishing that any designer would go to the trouble of making the poster and not including the data in a visual format:

European Parliament poster on gender equality with graphical representation of statistics included. For salary, the data point for men (€ 34,377) is taken to be 100%.

I’m just signal-boosting this. Background from cmcgovern before the quote.

The following post was written by Jane Ruffino in a note on Facebook. Facebook then removed it because they maintain it breaks their terms of service. I really wonder about the priorities of Facebook here considering the subject in question was convicted. Where exactly is the libel? You be the judge, and spread the lesson widely because it’s too rare we read the articulate expression of a woman who’s experienced violence in her relationship. I know I’m guilty of some of the well-meaning but useless attempts at expressing support Jane is talking about here and I’ll bet most other people are too.

Exactly a year ago, my then-boyfriend put me in a headlock and punched me until his hand shattered. The only reason I didn’t die on my bedroom floor on the night of May 3, 2012 is that he didn’t know where to put his thumb when he made a fist. It wasn’t the first time, nor, I’m sad to say, was it the last time, but it was the one he got caught for, and the one I can’t get sued for talking about.

He spent the night in a hospital, having his hand rebuilt with pins. I spent the night strapped to a trolley in a different hospital, having everything x-rayed. I left with stitches in my face and my blood-soaked clothes in a Dunnes Stores bag. He left the hospital five days later, in a cast, and with a diagnosis of “work and home stress”.

I still get concealer in my scar (and it is still sore), and I’m still not totally safe, but I’ve started to rebuild my life, and it’s getting pretty good. But while my life improves, dudes are still beating up women.

As much as I’d like to shut up about this and have people stop identifying me with something that happened to me, it’s not that common for an abuser to be convicted. I’m in a position to do something that many women are not, so I’ll keep talking until dudes stop beating up women.

We all know victims, so we all know perpetrators. It’s always someone you wish it weren’t. Believe me, I know this better than anyone.

Even though you can’t make a relationship with a violent dickhead safe for his girlfriend (or possibly for any woman), we can make the world safer for women by making it harder to get away with cracking our faces open.

Here’s some of what I think we need to do differently.

1. Swap your sympathy for empathy, and get angry: Nothing could get better for me until I got really angry, and empathy helped me get there. Empathising with me means you’ll stop asking me why I stayed, and assume that, like with any violent crime, it could happen to anyone. Empathising with him means you accept that it’s done by seemingly normal human beings, and not by easily identifiable monsters.

I do appreciate the “Sorry for your troubles”, but I’d rather you be angry with me than sad on my behalf. I know the sympathy comes from the right place, but it can feel a little like a pat on the head, and even a bit isolating. We live in a world where you can beat your girlfriend nearly to death and walk out of a criminal court straight into a pub for a burger and a pint. That should piss you right the fuck off, so if you don’t think it’s my fault, then don’t make it all my responsibility.

2. Trust us: Women like me lose the ability to trust ourselves, and we don’t often speak believably about what’s happening until it’s well in the past. Even I sometimes don’t believe me. And yes, we all take them back. It seems to have undermined my credibility with a lot of people, forever. Because hey, if I hadn’t been exaggerating all along, then why would I take someone back after he put me in the hospital?

I managed to gloss over the time I woke up with a pillow being pushed to my face. I didn’t want to believe he was capable of it any more than you did, so you should probably trust that I’m not going to make this shit up.

3. Start calling bullshit: Does your friend, your brother, your colleague insist that his girlfriend or wife is“batshit crazy”? Does she sound like a wild-eyed shrieking harpy who is totally ruining his life? I’ll tell you something: having the shit slapped out of you makes you a little crazy. Five weeks after I contacted his family to ask them to help him, I was in the hospital with a busted face. They hadn’t believed me because they’d been told I was crazy. I’m not, by the way, which I feel the need to say because trauma does all sorts of things to you, whether or not you ever get your face broken. But maybe if someone had started calling his bullshit years ago, he wouldn’t have ended up the way he is, and I would not have to rebuild my life and my sense of self.

Try it. Next time some guy says “She’s crazy”, assume what he really means is, “I’m an enormous dickhead with no respect for women.”

4. Stop looking for the truth: My account is true and real, and verified in a criminal court, but his account also represents a world he truly lived in. The fact is, we were both delusional. He believed I was a monstrous asshole, and I thought if I stopped being such a monstrous asshole, he would stop throwing things at my head and be the loving boyfriend he promised he’d be – if I only changed a few more things about myself.

It’s a Venn diagram, where the overlapping bit was “Jane is an irredeemable piece of shit”. It’s when I started insisting I was a worthy human being, when the punches and the slaps would start. You can rearrange the data points all you like, and get a hundred different versions, but there is no grey area between two overarching perspectives where you’ll find the truth you’re looking for. That crisscrossing of narratives applies to normal human relationships, but these were two competing and incompatible narratives, neither of which were rational.

This was a situation where I was trying to have a normal relationship with someone who once threw a pint of beer over me to prove he wasn’t an alcoholic. OK, so maybe that is a little crazy.

5. Let go of the checklist: You know the one. You Google “emotional abuse” because someone was a dick to you, and there it is. It’s a useful guide, perhaps, but you can’t identify abuse through a Cosmo quiz. Yes, abusers fit a profile, and in some ways, they’re all the damn same. They all try to smash your computer. They all put your phone through a wall. They all search your fucking email. And they all cry and beg for your love right after you’ve cleaned up the glass they smashed at your feet.

But there are times when we all fit the more minor things on those checklists. I’m talking about the name-calling, the voice-raising, the times we manipulate and goad and cajole our partners; it’s not OK, but it doesn’t make your relationship an abusive one. I’ve seen you cringe and turn all confessional when I tell you about things he did -– you’re like me, trying to make absolutely sure the same terrible tendencies aren’t in you. Every one of us probably has the capacity to turn into despots, or become complicit in terrible acts. Being mean doesn’t make us despots, but covering up domestic violence does make us complicit.

Working only from a checklist makes it easy to ignore the enormous difference between acting like a dick in an argument, and wanting absolute power over your partner. I’d hate to add up the amount of money I spent on therapy, desperately trying to understand if I was really the abuser all along. Until one day the penny dropped: sometimes I am a fucking asshole,but that doesn’t make me an abuser. Maybe this is obvious to you, but it was news to me. And yes, I still feel the need to prove it over and over, and I’ll never fully believe it myself.

Even I’m still looking for the truth, and I’m never going to find it.

6. Get over your need to diagnose: We live in a pathology-obsessed world. “He sounds like a psychopath.” “That’s sociopathic!” “How totally psychotic!” “Is he bipolar?” I don’t know, and frankly, unless you’re his doctor, it’s neither your place nor my place to slap a diagnosis onsomeone based on my description of him, especially given the bias I have since he cracked my face open like an egg.

Diagnosis is also what he used on me, as part of his pattern. I was Google-diagnosed with everything from premenstrual dysphoria to narcissistic sociopathy to -– wait for it -– Munchausen’s By Proxy (I told him I thought he drank too much). I think diagnoses are partly a form of excuse-making, but also, sometimes people are just assholes.

If you want to ask what diagnosis is most likely for him, try to be satisfied with “gigantic piece of shit”.

7. Focus on the perpetrator: Outside of gender-based violence, is there any other crime where the focus is so much on the victim that the criminal becomes practically invisible? Remember his name; forget mine: his name is Mark Patrick Kenneth Jordan and he broke his hand off my face. I get that it comes from a good place when you say I’m the last person you’d think it could happen to, but there’s an uncomfortable implication that it had more to do with me than it did with him.

In fact, he used my outward confidence to his advantage; it made me less believable, and it made people question me. Because rather than seeing me as the sort of person who sends work emails with my neck strapped to an emergency-room trolley, my ability to cope made me look suspicious. I don’t know what’s more humiliating: knowing people think I’m a domineering and irredeemable asshole, or people knowing how easily I caved on just about everything.

But until we shift the discussion from “Why do so many women get abused?” to “Why do so many men beat their partners?” it will continue to be a sympathy-driven discourse that puts the onus on the victim to stop getting her ass kicked.

8. Cut out the platitudes: It’s not that I don’t understand what you mean by “There’s nothing you could have done” or “Nobody deserves it” or “Even if you were batshit crazy” – I get it, but those phrases are meaningless. When I say that I want to find out why I am afraid of spiders but not the guy who smashed a door to splinters with his bare hands, I’m not blaming myself for staying. When I talk about the things I did wrong, I’m not blaming myself, I’m actually kind of revelling in the fact that I’m now safe to be a complicated and flawed human being without getting a smack for it. Just respect my intelligence and my agency, and accept that I am able to grasp the complex dynamics; I still want to understand why I had such terrible risk assessment.

I think that people are pretty good, generally, that most people try to do the right thing, but platitudes are part of an “I don’t want to get involved” attitude. You’re involved, like it or not. You think I wanted to be involved?

Stop spouting cliches and talk for real. As long as what you say isn’t worse than “you fisheyed c*nt”, you can be sure I’ve heard worse.

9. Stop raising awareness and start demanding consequences: The week of Mark’s sentencing, Women’s Aid did a balloon launch. Women’s Aid is an indispensible organization that does great work, but what does PR fluff achieve? How much more aware of violence against women do you need to be before you do something? And are we so afraid of women’s anger that our own organisations are resorting to nice-girl complacency?

Pretty much every one of my calls to the cops – even with a barring order in place – was met with dismissiveness and impatience. They won’t start taking women like me seriously until the community makes it impossible to get away with beating us up.

It’s a crime against the state, which means the victim is only a witness. Violence against women is a crime against you.

10. Don’t hit women: It’s statistically likely that some of you reading this hit your partners, or will eventually. If this is you, then, hey – go fuck yourself.

I pretty much want to smash my computer screen in at the moment. Yesterday, online feminism shared a tiny victory, as ITV were convinced to pull a feature on the ‘Justice for Ched’ campaign – which aims to free a convicted rapist from prison. The group is notorious among feminists as an utterly vile bunch of victim-blamers, led by Evan’s girlfriend. Evan’s survivor has had a year of abuse and bullying, has been illegally named, and is currently believed to have had to change her name and move to escape persecution.

Allow me to present exhibit A:

Screenshot of a Facebook page, where a user (identity blurred out) has posted: “she will get the chance to go out get drunk off her head and drugged up again and dupe some other poor lad into rape its about time ched got released and this poor excuse for a girl got what she deserves at least 5 years for what shes done ! justiceforched utb”

“Dupe some other poor lad into rape”

Dupe… into rape.

Sorry to break this to you dude, but you cannot trick someone into raping you. Rape involves the non-consensual penetration of another human being[1]. You cannot be tricked by someone into doing something to them without their consent – by definition, they would be consenting, by deciding to perform such a ‘trick’ on you[2].

I believe that the injustice you perceive to have happened, is that even though Evans was proved, by the court, to have committed rape[3], he shouldn’t have to worry about something so trivial as consent. That his victim, due to drinking and other ‘slutty’ behaviour, deserved to be penetrated without her consent.

Well next time you, or a friend, are passed out drunk, I’d like you to consider how you would feel to wake up and find you had been penetrated whilst you were unable to consent. Did you deserve it? Or do you simply think that this woman deserved it, because actually, it’s women’s autonomy that you have a problem with?

[3] Something which is vanishingly rare. A snapshot of statistics: 85,000 women and 12,000 men in the UK are estimated to be raped each year. 16,000 are reported to police. 1,070 convictions are made. That’s 1.1% of estimated rapes that end with a conviction.